me. Sometimes it seems to me that all the world, all life, everything, had
taken up residence inside of me and was clamoring for me to be the spokesman. I
feel - oh, I can't describe it - I feel the bigness of it, but when I speak, I
babble like a little child. It is a great task to transmute feeling and
sensation into speech, written or spoken, that will, in turn, in him who reads
or listens, transmute itself back into the selfsame feeling and sensation. It is
a lordly task. See, I bury my face in the grass, and the breath I draw in
through my nostrils sets me quivering with a thousand thoughts and fancies. It
is a breath of the universe I have breathed. I know song and laughter, and
success and pain, and struggle and death; and I see visions that arise in my
brain somehow out of the scent of the grass, and I would like to tell them to
you, to the world. But how can I? My tongue is tied. I have tried, by the spoken
word, just now, to describe to you the effect on me of the scent of the grass.
But I have not succeeded. I have no more than hinted in awkward speech. My words
seem gibberish to me. And yet I am stifled with desire to tell. Oh! -« he threw
up his hands with a despairing gesture - »it is impossible! It is not
understandable! It is incommunicable!«
    »But you do talk well,« she insisted. »Just think how you have improved in
the short time I have known you. Mr. Butler is a noted public speaker. He is
always asked by the State Committee to go out on stump during campaign. Yet you
talked just as well as he the other night at dinner. Only he was more
controlled. You get too excited; but you will get over that with practice. Why,
you would make a good public speaker. You can go far - if you want to. You are
masterly. You can lead men, I am sure, and there is no reason why you should not
succeed at anything you set your hand to, just as you have succeeded with
grammar. You would make a good lawyer. You should shine in politics. There is
nothing to prevent you from making as great a success as Mr. Butler has made.
And minus the dyspepsia,« she added with a smile.
    They talked on; she, in her gently persistent way, returning